Retired cop: Pot prohibition isn’t working
Howard Rahtz is a police academy instructor and author of “Drugs, Crime and Violence: From Trafficking to Treatment.”
My career fighting drug abuse began in 1972, the year after President Nixon declared “War on Drugs.” I began as a counseling supervisor working with heroin addicts at a Cincinnati methadone clinic. Close to 40 years later, I retired as commander of the Cincinnati Police Department’s Vice Unit, with responsibility for citywide drug enforcement. During my career, I saw our drug war from both the treatment side and the law enforcement side. I saw – and tried to help – people whose lives were destroyed by their addiction, and I witnessed the pain it caused their families. I saw – and tried to stop – the violence that drug trafficking brought to our neighborhoods. And, along the way, I learned an important lesson about our national War on Drugs: We failed.
We didn’t fail because we weren’t committed enough or because we weren’t tough enough on drug criminals. We didn’t fail because we lacked the right technology or tools to do the job. We failed because we didn’t learn the key lesson from the 1920s effort to outlaw alcohol: Prohibition doesn’t work. It only worsens the problem.
When we enacted alcohol prohibition in 1920, we put criminals and murderers in charge of a multibillion-dollar market for a product that Americans continued to demand. They got rich and the United States became a less safe place. People began killing one another over moonshine. Customers were poisoned by contaminated alcohol. And law enforcement was left facing an unending struggle that it couldn’t win.
Just as there was for alcohol, there is a clear market for marijuana. An estimated 30 million Americans use marijuana every year. Right now, drug traffickers control the marijuana market. Marijuana is their cash cow, accounting for an estimated 60 percent of their revenue. Just as the bootleggers did for alcohol, the cartels control the drug’s potency, when and where it is sold, who can buy it, what it contains, and what it costs. And they use the revenue from marijuana to fund a massive, international criminal operation that reaches into every community in our country.
Enforcing marijuana prohibition has not put a dent in this enterprise. We arrest roughly 750,000 people every year for marijuana offenses, and yet the number of people using marijuana has not substantially changed. Earlier this year, the Marijuana Policies of Ohio Task Force (www.mpotf.org), led by Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters, reported that more than 42 percent of adult Americans have tried marijuana at least once and more than a million of our fellow Ohioans use marijuana each year. Despite having spent an estimated trillion dollars aggressively pursuing the the War on Drugs and incarcerating more of our citizens than any country on earth, the drug business rolls on.
The wreckage of this failed policy is evident in the ruined lives of millions of Americans. Marijuana criminalization and its effects are far more harmful than marijuana itself. Drug convictions carry lifetime consequences, including barriers to scholarships, employment and housing. And by allowing the cartels to control the marijuana market, we create opportunities for them to push more dangerous drugs onto American citizens.
Our predecessors had the wisdom to realize that Prohibition was a failed solution. It wasn’t Eliot Ness and his Untouchables that brought the Capone cartel down. What defeated the moonshiners and bootleggers was the repeal of Prohibition and the legal and regulated sale of alcohol.
Our system for overseeing and regulating alcohol certainly isn’t perfect. But it is vastly better than what we had during the Prohibition era.
We have begun to see just how much better things can be in the states that have already legalized the use of marijuana by adults. In Colorado, for example, it has resulted in a $120 million tax windfall for the state, which is going back into the economy for roads, schools and social services.
By voting to legalize marijuana, we create economic opportunities for thousands of Ohioans. We make our communities safer for our families. And we put a financial hit on the drug cartels that takes the economic foundation of their enterprise out from under them.